December 02, 2008

Robert Garcet, La tour d´Eben Ezer/The Eben-Ezer Tower

pictures (april 2010) by Inky van Swelm

Dominating the rural area around Eben-Emael, north of Liège in Belgium, the Eben-Ezer Tower is an exceptional creative construction, full of symbolism, made single-handedly by a man who worked it for over ten years.

Life and works

Robert Garcet (1912-2001) was born in Mons, a city in the south of Belgium. At age 18 he moved from this city to the Jeker-area in in the north-east of Belgium, north of Liège and south of Maastricht, where he got a job as a laborer in the quarries in that area.

Eventually Garcet would become owner of a silex quarry.

He was very interested in geology, nature, the history of mankind and biblical studies and he wrote a lot of books (in french) on these subjects, in which he developed a personal vision of the creation of man.

Robert Garcet was a pacifist and after World War II, around 1947, he began making plans to construct a big tower as a symbol of peace for mankind.

In 1953 he actually began its construction, which would take him over ten years to complete. With the occasional help of friends a 33 m (108 ft) high tower arose, mainly made from silex building-stones.

The dimensions of the tower are related to classical numerologist principles. So the sacred number seven is reflected in the four sides of the tower which each measure 7.77 meter, while the tower has seven floors. The structure itself contains a lot of symbolism: the first floor is the earth, the seventh is heaven.

On the corners at the top four sculptures are displayed which impersonate characters of the the biblical book the Apocalypse (a bull, a lion, an eagle and an angel).

When visiting the tower one first passes the huge outside staircase and then one enters the room of the Cherubs with angels sculpted along a central column, murals representing biblical stories and a sculpted representation of the biblical book the Apocalypse.

The grounds beneath the tower contain an old network of corridors, like an old quarry. Garcet has interpreted this as a ca 70 million years old village and in his opinion the inhabitants of that village occupied themselves with sculpting silex stones into impersonations of people and animals.

This may be apocryphal.

Garcet's find however, in 1958, of the skeleton of a mosasaurus, a snake-like reptile with swim fins, should be authentic.

This underground area partly has been distorted by a mining explosion. The remainder can not be visited by the public.

Museum
* This very special art environment, currently managed by a foundation, houses a museum, le musée du silex, which informs the public about Garcet's work and vision. Its website includes a biography and a bibliography.

In short

If you are looking for a specific art environment, best use the the indexes above, by which one can select by

- name of the artist, or by- country/region

About this blog

This blog is an inventory and documentary of outsider art environments in Europe.

It is about people who without relevant professional training, during many years and with a lot of passion transform their house/garden into a relatively large-scale artwork by embellishing it with decorations, paintings, mosaics, sculptures and/or structures, in general doing this outside of and disregarded by the world of professionals.